Seems like only yesterday that Eric Holder was inveighing against sweeping executive war powers. These were the Bush years, when Holder could readily be found caviling about such odious practices as “secret electronic surveillance against American citizens” and “detain[ing] American citizens without due process of law.” Back then, Holder declared these Bush war crimes so “needlessly abusive and unlawful” that the American people (translation: the Bush-deranged Left) were owed “a reckoning” against the officials who conjured them up.

But once he became attorney general in a Democratic administration, the ever-malleable Mr. Holder decided there was actually no problem killing American citizens without due process of law, based on intelligence gleaned from secret surveillance.

The breathtaking hypocrisy of the Obama Democrats is what screams off the pages of the “white paper” Holder’s Justice Department has served up to support the president’s use of lethal force against U.S. nationals who align with our foreign terrorist enemies. It bears remembering that Holder, like his Gitmo Bar soul mates, once volunteered his services to the enemy. At the time, he was a senior partner at a firm that was among the Lawyer Left’s most eager to provide free legal help to al-Qaeda enemy combatants in their lawsuits against the American people. Holder filed an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, an American citizen turned al-Qaeda operative who was sent to the United States by Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in 2002 to attempt a post-9/11 “second wave” of mass-murder attacks.

Just so you get the gist of where Holder was coming from, an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief is not something a lawyer has to file on behalf of a client. Padilla already had other counsel. Holder was a party crasher, gratuitously intervening — exploiting his status as a former Clinton deputy attorney general — to steer the court toward his desired policy.

And that desired policy? Holder wanted terrorism relegated to the criminal-justice system, as it had been before Bush pivoted to a law-of-war paradigm. According to the pre-2009 Holder, if an enemy-combatant terrorist, particularly an American citizen, is encountered away from a traditional battlefield, the Constitution demands that he be given the rights of a criminal defendant. Executive action against him may be taken only under judicial supervision. Yes, Holder conceded, this might mean that the government will be barred from detaining and interrogating many a “dangerous terrorist.” And yes, it risks the reprise of 9/11’s slaughter of nearly 3,000 Americans. “But,” he blithely concluded, “our Nation has always been prepared to accept some risk as the price of guaranteeing that the Executive does not have arbitrary power to imprison citizens.”

Ah, but arbitrary power to kill citizens — now, that’s a different story.

It seems that conservatives have enormous difficulty getting along. Often we see them at odds with each other and dismissing the very groups trying to defend conservative ideas and assumptions. Some identify as neo-conservatives, others as paleo-conservatives, still others labor to distinguish themselves from libertarian conservatives. Fiscal conservatives set themselves apart from social and religious conservatives. Some are anti-Bush conservatives, some are RINOs. Many jumped on the Arab Spring bandwagon; others, far more prescient, warned of the disaster it portended. Some see major conservative figures like Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Tommy Robinson, Ann Coulter, and Geert Wilders as stalwart defenders of Western values; others regard them as inflexible bigots and warmongers.

Recently, I hosted a dinner for a few conservative friends, well-known and influential people in the political community and doing much good work in promoting freedom, justice, national security, sane immigration policy, Zionism, the sovereignty of the individual, and resistance to tyrannical ideologies. And yet, as the evening progressed, basic divisions began to be exposed, especially with respect to the axial distinction between Islam and Islamism — a necessary differentiation, according to my friends. The equation of Islam and Islamism, they argued, arose from ignorance. In fact, it conceded ground to the radicals and extremists, as one of my cherished friends put it in a subsequent letter to me, “by accepting the Islamists’ view that they are the sole representatives of Islam.”

Islamists, from my friend’s perspective, are barbarians, Bedouin outriders to the faith, marginal entities who “clothe themselves in the texts of Islam” instead of recognizing, as do their “moderate” brethren, that a renewed and “open reading” of the Koran is perennially possible and that the more offensive passages can be historicized and legitimately abrogated. Like any other religion, on this view, Islam is not “immune to the dialectics of history,” and can be reinterpreted and brought into a productive relation with the current era. All people of good will should therefore support these moderates and must be on guard not to alienate them through loose talk about the dangers of Islam.

For myself, though I would wish to eschew controversy among the ostensibly like-minded and cease throwing lead downrange, the dinner-party conversation struck me as evidence of how such divisions over the nature of Islam create a crippling discord amongst conservatives. The meliorists discriminate between a “good Islam” and a “bad Islam,” accusing those with whom they disagree of a perilous conflation of incompatibles. This “bad Islam,” apparently, is the product of a grievous misinterpretation of the primary documents and historical lore on the part of those who have “hijacked” the faith. It is not really Islam.

But the point is, as Anjem Choudary, head of the radical al-Muhajiroun (“the immigrants”) movement in Britain, assures us [1], the division between moderates and extremists is a “classification [that] does not exist in Islam.” Similarly, after the recent terrorist attack on a BP natural gas plant in Algeria, costing 81 lives, one of the perpetrators announced: “We’ve come in the name of Islam, to teach the Americans what Islam is.” And they have the liturgy and consecrations with them. As Robert Spencer comments [2], “mainstream media coverage has followed the usual patterns, downplaying or ignoring outright what the attackers said about what they were hoping to accomplish, since these statements lead to questions about Islam that they would prefer not be asked.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/02/timbuktu_and_the_nazis.html The calculated destruction of libraries and cultural artifacts has a long history. Reading about the recent and deliberate destruction in Timbuktu, Mali by al Qaeda-backed terrorists who had governed Timbuktu reminds one of the relentless zeal of dictators to annihilate artistic and religious expressions of creativity. It is, as Hector Feliciano has written in […]

http://www.examiner.com/article/saudi-imam-rapes-tortures-5-yr-old-daughter-because-he-doubted-her-virginity In line with Sharia’a Law, a father cannot be executed for the slaying of either his wife or any of his children. The $50,000 blood money presented to the girl’s mother is half the amount if the murdered child were a boy. A popular Saudi Arabian television preacher was found guilty of murdering his […]

Mohamemd al-Arifi, an influential Saudi religious scholar and professor at King Saud University, has thrown a bombshell by claiming that al-Qaeda “does not tolerate bloodshed” and that it was victimized by attributing to it a bad ideology.
During a recent television interview, he went as far as claiming that the late Oussama Bin Laden (who he referred to as “Sheikh Oussama” and prayed for his soul to be blessed) was a victim of wide-level character assassination.

Arifi, known for his often controversial statements and fatwas such as the one calling for daughters not to wear revealing clothes in the presence of their fathers, was answering questions on the Qatari state-owned Al Jazeera television this week about the French intervention in Mali.

While pointing out that “the issue in Mali” was blown out of proportion, Arifi said some people attribute to al-Qaeda many opinions and thoughts which the group does not hold.

“These beliefs in fact are not correct. Al-Qaeda members do not tolerate accusing other Muslims of apostasy and they do not tolerate bloodshed. I am not part of al-Qaeda and I do not adopt their thinking, but Allah says: ‘And when you testify, be just,’” Arifi said.

He said that from his meeting with al-Qaeda members who went through the kingdom’s terrorist rehabilitation program, he discovered that they did not hold opinions and thoughts often attributed to al-Qaeda.
“Even al-Qaeda leader Sheikh Oussama Bin Laden, may his soul rest in peace, did not adopt many of the thoughts that are attributed to him today,” Arfif explained.

HIS FATHER WAS JACOBO TIMERMAN THE PUBLISHER WHO WAS UNDER HOUSE ARREST FOR CONFRONTING THE ATROCITIES OF ARGENTINA’S “DIRTY WAR.” JEWISH HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS LOBBIED FOR HIS RELEASE AND HE RELOCATED TO ISRAEL IN 1979 WHERE HE WASTED NO TIME IN BASHING ISRAEL’S ROLE IN THE 1982 LEBANON WAR AND BECAME A VOCAL CRITIC ACCUSING SHARON OF ATROCITIES IN LEBANON. IN 1984 HE RETURNED TO ARGENTINA WHERE HE DIED IN 1999. ANOTHER SON DANIEL LIVES IN ISRAEL….RSK

Hector Timerman has caused a fresh diplomatic problems for his country by claiming Israel “encourages anti-Semitism”.

ector Timerman, the hypocritical Argentinian foreign minister who earlier this week claimed the UK should heed UN calls for talks over the Falklands, has caused a fresh diplomatic problems for his country by claiming Israel “encourages anti-Semitism”.

The statement was apparently made during a “difficult and unpleasant” meeting with Israel’s ambassador to Argentina, in which the issue of the 1994 Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (AMIA) bombing was raised.

Iran and Argentina have recently been co-operating in a fresh investigation into the bombings, which critics have claimed is Iran’s attempt to shift blame away from its proxy, Hezbollah, over the atrocity which killed 85 people and injured around 300.

Timerman is reported to have remarked that Israel should stay out of Argentina’s business, even though, hypocritcally, Iran seems to have a large stake in the matter. The foreign minister apparently stated that Israel’s interest in the bombing “encourages anti-Semitism” by implying Jewish Argentinians have split loyalties – an anti-Semitic trope in itself.

Iran and Argentina have agreed to create a “truth commission” to investigate the 1994 bombing of AMIA, the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires.

“Israel has no right to demand explanations; we’re a sovereign state,” Timerman reportedly told Shavit. “Israel doesn’t speak in the name of the Jewish people and doesn’t represent it. Jews who wanted or want to live in Israel moved there, and they are its citizens; those who live in Argentina are Argentine citizens. The attack was against Argentina, and Israel’s desire to be involved in the issue only encourages anti-Semitism from those who accuse Jews of dual loyalty.”

Further to yesterday’s post, Bruce Bawer has a very good report on the attempted assassination of my friend Lars Hedegaard in Copenhagen:

Hedegaard opened the door and was handed a package by the guy, who then drew a pistol and shot at him. Miraculously, the gunman missed – just barely. While he fumbled with his weapon, trying to get off another shot, Lars acted fast, striking his assailant, who dropped the gun. Lars tried to shut the door, but the perpetrator stuck his foot in and managed to push it open again and to pick up his pistol. The two men struggled, and the goon finally took it on the lam.

He was last seen at the Copenhagen Zoo, which seems appropriate. We laugh at the ineptitude of these bozo jihadists, but, as the IRA taunted Mrs. Thatcher after the Brighton bombing, they only have to be lucky once; you have to be lucky every time. This time Lars was lucky. That first shot whistled past his ear — and then a spry septuagenarian clobbered “a man around 25 with a foreign background” with the phony package he’d been handed, and tenaciously fought back.

Last summer, over in Europe, I had the privilege of presenting Lars with a Defender of Freedom Award for his brave words. Yesterday morning, he was called on to defend freedom more directly. Had he died, it would have been a grievous loss. Even so, because of the folly and delusion of the European establishment, it was a close call — and not the last.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ EVOLUTION, IT’S NOT JUST FOR FISH The Illegal Alien Amnesty (it’s not amnesty, you pay a fine!) was sold as a comprehensive immigration reform plan. Then we found out that the enforcement part of the plan is going to be watered down further and it’s basically another illegal alien amnesty, just like the one […]